For His Holiness: Yungchen Lhamo and "Someday"

Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan exile in New York City, sings today's random tune. Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. This song, Someday, can be found on her 2008 album Ama, and is for the Dalai Lama, who she hopes will come home to Tibet someday.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungchen_Lhamo

Some Help From Dad: Yungchen Lhamo and "Lhasa"

Today's random tune is by Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan exile in New York City. Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. This song, Lhasa, can be found on her 2008 album Ama, and is dedicated to her father who co-wrote the song.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungchen_Lhamo

Shaped by Place and Parentage: Yungchen Lhamo and "Lhasa"

Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan exile in New York City, sings today's random tune. Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. This song, Lhasa, can be found on her 2008 album Ama, and is dedicated to her father who co-wrote the song.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungchen_Lhamo

The Eyes are the Prize: Yungchen Lhamo and "Nyebe Nilam"

Yungchen Lhamo brings us our random tune for today, called Nyebe Nilam. A Tibetan exile in New York City, Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. Nyebe Nilam can be found on her 2008 album Ama. The title of the song translates to "Eyelash Girl" and is the plea of a young man to a beautiful woman to notice him because he is too shy to approach her.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungchen_Lhamo; https://worldmusiccentral.org/2006/08/28/interview-with-tibetan-singer-yungchen-lhamo/

For City and Father: Yungchen Lhamo and "Lhasa"

Today's random tune is by Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan exile in New York City. Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. This song, Lhasa, can be found on her 2008 album Ama, and is dedicated to her father.

Goddess of Song: Yungchen Lhamo and "Gebu Shere"

Today's random tune is by Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan exile in New York City. Lhamo's name translates to "Goddess of Song," and was given to her by a lama after her birth in Lhasa. Fleeing Tibet in 1989, she first lived in Australia and then in New York. She tours extensively, singing unaccompanied, and has collaborated with artists such as Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Sheryl Crow, Michael Stipe and Peter Gabriel, to whose label, Real World Records, she is under contract. This song, Gebu Shere, can be found on her 2008 album Ama, and is about a missing lover - which she describes as the reality of a lot of Tibetans who live apart because of exile.

What's Your Sign?: Sa Dingding and "Capricorn"

What's your sign? That phrase is often satirized as a pickup line. I never felt comfortable with my sign. I'm a Capricorn, and I was always bored by my horoscope. Whenever I read my horoscope, and got to Capricorn, it always seemed that a Capricorn was the most boring person on earth! It seemed like all we were interested in was business. While it seemed like all the other signs were getting their groove on, finding love and getting involved in intrigue, all the Caps were interested in was the stock market, or the financial pages. I concluded that if I was a Capricorn, I was a very unlikely one. The only horoscope page I could read about Capricorns was Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology, which seemed a little more...I don't know...open and esoteric about astrological signs.

Sa Dingding makes you feel anything but businesslike. Beautiful and with a haunting voice, and appearing in a gorgeous video, it makes one feel like being Capricorn is sexy and exotic. A singer-songwriter of mixed Chinese Han and Mongolian ancestry, she was influenced early in her life by the folk music of the ethnic minorities of Mongolia and China, and she became interested in Buddhism and learned to speak many languages, including Mandarin, Sanskrit and Tibetan. She also created her own language to bring out her songs' emotions. Dingding released her first album at 18, and in 2008 she won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for the Asia-Pacific region. That award gave her the chance to perform for a western audience for the first time. She co-wrote a song in 2008 with Eric Moquet of Deep Forest to raise funds for the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake relief, and she has recently performed at WOMAD and at the UK's Harrogate Festival. She has also announced plans for a European tour. Capricorn can be found on her 2012 CD The Coming Ones.

Remembering What Was Lost: Yungchen Lhamo and "9/11"

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to see Yungchen Lhamo at our local global music festival, Globalquerque. I remember that her voice was captivating, and not only that, but she also was very engaging with the audience. she told the stories behind each of the songs she did. Since I had not had a lot of experience with Asian music, it was a great opportunity to become better acquainted with at least this branch of Asian music.

As a matter of fact, I have very little experience with Asia at all. I did go to Bangladesh, which is a country that not a lot of Westerners visit, and I stayed in Dhaka and in rural areas for upwards of a month, but the media I saw in Bangladesh was overwhelmingly Indian or Indian influenced. I realize that India is in Asia, but I always saw it as being something apart. On that same trip, I got to spend a few days in Bangkok, Thailand, and that has whetted my appetite to see more but, unfortunately, that was in 1998 and therefore it's been 16 years since I traveled there. Asia always seems to have a mysterious pull and at the same time, be a bit intimidating to me. Perhaps I feel that way because of language - Asian languages approximate nothing that I know or am familiar with. Whereas I could go to Europe and be able to read the Western script and pick up a bit of the languages and perhaps communicate a little in non-English speaking countries, in Asia I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of the writing and I would recognize nothing in the spoken language.

Perhaps it's the expense. Airfares to Asia are a bit intimidating. A country like Japan, which I would love to visit, has prices that are astronomically high. Perhaps it's the crush of the cities that I see on television and print - Chinese cities where visibility is almost nothing because of smog and where people are crowded together like sardines in a can. Or perhaps it's something else. Whatever the reason, I have not really spent much time there and would like to. I often think of traveling in the less traveled and more remote areas, and it would be great to see a country like Tibet, with its temples, monks and lifestyle that is modernizing due to Chinese influence but also tenaciously tries to hold on to its old traditions. To see and experience in some way the struggles of people transitioning between the old and new, and trying to decide what to keep of each, would be very exciting.

Today's tune comes from a Tibetan exile. Born in Lhasa, Yungchen Lhamo fled Tibet in 1989 and after a pilgrimage to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Llama, she was inspired to reach out to the world through her music so that others would understand the beauty of her culture and the situation in Tibet. After a period in India, she moved to Australia in 1993 and to New York City in 2000. Her debut album in Australia received a top award for folk/traditional music and led to her signing with Peter Gabriel's label. She has since performed with artists such as Natalie Merchant, Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Peter Gabriel, Bono, Sheryl Crow and Michael Stipe, and performed at Lilith Fair and WOMAD. This song, 9/11, is from her 2006 album Ama (Mother). Of the song she writes:

"....This song begins and ends with chants reminiscent of a puja for the people who died, with prayers to ease their passage to another world.... In order for this tragedy not to happen again, what are we going to do about it? We can only hope the experience has made all of us more human."

 Yungchen Lhamo, as quoted in her Wikipedia entry

Free Tibet: Techung and Rang zen-Independence

When I was in college, I first started seeing the Free Tibet slogans and the Tibetan flag (a sun rising over a mountain peak). Over the years I have loosely followed the Tibetan story, which mostly gets retold in our country when the Dalai Lama comes to America or something happens to Tibet. The history, as I understand it, is that for centuries Tibet was a proud, independent nation governed on the principles of Tibetan Buddhism. In the 1950s, the Chinese made good on their longstanding claim to Tibet and invaded, turning Tibet into a Chinese province. They attempted to usurp the selection process of the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, by proposing their own candidate. This caused the young Dalai Lama (who is believed to be the same spiritual being reincarnated into different bodies throughout history) to flee to India. Today he lives in exile with other exiled Tibetans, while China slowly tries to assimilate Tibet into the rest of China with varying degrees of success.

There are a number of good documentaries about the Dalai Lama and his journey, and others about the Tibetan situation. I have an interesting story about Tibet: my wife's sister-in-law snuck into Tibet in the 70s on a rope bridge across a deep chasm and spent a little bit of time there (the area is generally not open to foreigners without a permit and there was a time when it was not open to Westerners at all).

The music selection for today is by Tibetan artist who goes by the nickname of Techung when he plays music solo, and as Tashi Dhondup Sharzur at other times. He is a second generation Tibetan exile born in Tibet but raised in Dharamsala, India. As an adult he splits his time between Dharamsala and San Francisco. He studied Tibetan music, dance and opera extensively as a child at the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts, and has become one of the key keepers of Tibetan musical and performing arts traditions. He founded the San Francisco-based Chaksampa Tibetan Dance and Opera Company in 1989, and is known for his collaborative work that explores his own musical heritage and that of other world music traditions. His latest album, Techung-Tibet-Lam La Che: On The Road (2013) features collaborative work with Keb' Mo'.

This song, Rang zen-Independence, is from his 2004 album A Compilation of Tibetan Folk and Freedom Songs.